


Lurking About in No-Man's Land

by Lauren (notalwaysweak)



Category: Jurassic Park (Movies), Parks and Recreation
Genre: Crossovering Exchange, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-17
Updated: 2015-08-17
Packaged: 2018-04-15 04:29:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,132
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4592880
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/notalwaysweak/pseuds/Lauren
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>April's new veterinary role still involves parks. Sort of. It also involves non-disclosure agreements, a secluded island, and some very sharp teeth.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Lurking About in No-Man's Land

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Spacecadet72](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Spacecadet72/gifts).



> Neither _Jurassic Park_ nor _Parks and Recreation_ belong to me, and I am making no financial profit off this work of fan fiction. 
> 
> Betaed by Em, with thanks.

The long-fronded palm trees around the landing pad bend back with the wind of the chopper's passing. April squints into the sun as the chopper touches down. It seems like forever since she's seen them, but even so it's still just her same old Leslie and Ben who come running wind-whipped across the tarmac. Leslie hugs her; April, in a moment of weakness, hugs her back. Ben is better about just giving her a nod and a smile, which April returns.

"Normally they'd have someone higher up than me come to welcome you," April says—it's as close as she'll get to apologizing-slash-complaining for not being the CEO—"but because I know you they thought a familiar face would be better, under the circumstances."

"Under what circumstances?" Leslie asks, just as one of the brachis in the nearby viewing pen lets out a pained bellow. "What was that?"

April can feel the smile spreading on her face. "Let's go." She gets behind the wheel of the ATV and waits for them to settle in the back before starting down the road to the brachi pen.

*

The viewing deck set into the side of the brachi pen affords them a sweeping panorama of lush grassland thickly dotted with trees and shrubs. April's still surprised how well the brachis do with modern plants, and glad that they didn't have to resurrect long-dead veggies along with the dinosaurs.

"We bring them out here when they're still pretty young, to get them used to having space to roam but still be able to tell exactly where they all are," she says conversationally.

"'They' being..." Leslie trails off as one of the juvenile brachis, built like a shorter, squatter giraffe, and very clearly a dinosaur, comes trotting out from between the trees, bound on a mission to one of the shrubs close to the viewing deck.

She—the dinosaur, not Leslie—bites off a mouthful of leaves and starts chewing.

She—Leslie, not the dinosaur—gapes at the sight and puts one palm against the glass.

"Is that a—that's a—" Ben forces the words out, jaw dropped.

"Brachiosaurus," April supplies.

Fortunately the viewing deck is just wood and not concrete; it makes for a slightly softer landing when Ben faints.

*

April offers to let them to come into the pen with her while she investigates the pained noises that one of the brachis is still making out there; this is the part that's really her job, after all.

Ben, sipping water from a bottle one of the numerous support staff has brought him, just about beats her through the door. Leslie follows her, looking simultaneously awestruck and worried. It's an expression April is very familiar with, having seen it on Leslie's face many times over the years.

It's easy to find an injured, noisy dinosaur, even in the reasonably thick scrub. The brachi in question is one of the younger juveniles, meaning she's only as tall as April, but reacts like a skittish horse when April tries to check her over, prancing and side-stepping.

"Come on, don't make me tranquilize you in front of the guests," she mutters, and for a wonder the brachi quits her little dino dressage moment and stands still.

Ben and Leslie are also standing still, enraptured. April tries to make it look like she doesn't basically have a headlock on the brachi and strokes under her chin, trying to persuade her to open her mouth.

"Oh, ow," she says, and she hears Ben's sympathetic hiss of pain when he sees what she's seen: an acacia thorn, perhaps three inches long, of which half is embedded in the brachi's gum. April works it free easily. While she's doing so Ben reaches out to touch the brachi's neck with the reverence of a small child touching a python, although with decidedly less hesitation.

"What if you weren't here to take that out?" Leslie asks as April tucks the thorn into her shirt pocket.

"It probably would have worked loose the next time she ate something else." April gestures around them; a handful of brachis have gathered, drawn by the noise of their wounded sibling. "Or one of the others might have knocked it loose for her." _Or she might have wound up with a gum infection and been seriously sick. Or died. Because these are ancient creatures in the modern world and we can only predict their behavior so far._ She does not voice these more pessimistic options.

Ben keeps stroking the brachi's neck, murmuring something under his breath. The brachi's eyes blink slowly open and closed. April's not sure if that means she likes the attention or if she's just bored. People have mapped dinosaurs onto reptiles and onto birds but, after nine months working for InGen, April's pretty sure that dinosaurs are just their own selves.

Not to mention that after all of Dr Wu's genetic tinkering, none of them are a hundred percent what they used to be in the first place.

Still, that's just part of the job: figuring out how these animals work and how they react to humans. Especially humans other than the ones who've raised them since birth.

Watching Ben petting the brachi, Leslie tentatively reaching out to touch the dinosaur's pebbled skin, April knows it's just as much about how the humans react to the dinosaurs, too.

*

"So you had absolutely no idea what I was going to show you today?" April asks as they continue on down the road toward the main laboratory building. This is one of the things that Masrani's asked all of them to do: keep an eye on security. Not just electric fences and concrete walls security; whispers of what they are trying to build here, let slip before their time, could turn this delicate operation into a media circus.

"Actually, we did get three letters at the office before we finalized the trip," Leslie says. "They more or less said 'don't go', 'please don't go', and 'I may have retired from teaching mathematics but I can promise you this is 100% guaranteed to fail'."

April's lips tighten; she recognizes the tone of the last one. She makes a mental note to ask Donna to get in touch with Dr Malcolm and ask him nicely to shut the hell up. Apart from anything else he's under enough NDAs that if he keeps contacting people and insinuating things, it might be safer to just gag him before he says the right keyword to the right person and this gets out before they're ready.

Donna will know what to say to him. She's known what to say all along; she was the one who agreed to Dr Wu's proposal that they come out and see the island in the first place—again, buried under so many piles of paperwork that, had they opted not to join the project, April thinks she would still be signing endless promises to keep her mouth shut. And Donna was the one who summarized all their feelings with, "Holy shit," when they were first led into the viewing area by the brachi pen.

As for Sattler and Grant, assuming they sent the other two letters (really, letters? Not emails? But then these days neither Leslie nor Ben have readily accessible Pawnee Parks Department email addresses on an easy to find website), Donna can probably handle them as well. "Don't go" isn't exactly as paranoid as Dr Malcolm's take on the situation, but she's seen communications from all three of them, and Sattler and Grant both seem like they're willing to try to circumvent their NDAs if it means saving lives.

But that's the thing: nobody's died. None of the humans, anyway. Hundreds, probably thousands, of embryos weren't viable. Dozens, maybe hundreds, of eggs just never hatched, or the hatchlings only made it a few hours.

April has been there for every death of those animals that made it out of the nursery.

She is of course not responsible for flaws in the genetic code, or inaccurate assumptions about dietary requirements leading to animals starving while she and the other veterinary staff worked around the clock to try and figure out what was wrong, or any of the unpredictable, random, sometimes inexplicable reasons that the animals don't make it to maturity.

This project wasn't her idea; like Andy and Donna, Ann and Chris, and even Ron (some days she still can't believe Ron stuck around, but there he is, one of the game wardens and happy as a pig in mud about it), she came in well after the beginning.

But now that she's in, now that she's a part of the project and an InGen employee and privy to this unbelievable secret world, she takes it very personally.

And so she's there for every juvenile death, and every mature death, down to standing next to Ron as he ordered a whole pack of three-year-old compys, dinosaurs that had been born virtually at the beginning of the project, shot dead. Not for attacking anyone, or for harming anyone, but for contracting H5N1. It was either shoot them or risk the whole damn project falling prey to the damn flu. A stupid disease that hadn't even existed 150 million years ago.

"April? Are you crying?"

April swipes at her eyes with one hand, keeping the other hand on the wheel. "No. We're nearly there. Andy and the others can't wait to see you."

*

"Hey, honey!" Andy's bouncing in place by the raptor pen. "Hey, I had an idea—hi Leslie, hi Ben—about how Bravo doesn't really answer to Bravo, you know, so I thought maybe, _maybe_ , because she's got those blue stripes—"

"A discoloration due to, we assume, the introduction of DNA from _Tiliqua scincoides_ ," April says as an aside to Ben, who nods, dazed. "We're not sure how the blue migrated from her tongue to her skin." The words roll off her tongue smoothly; Masrani's had them learning little scripts like tour guides, just for practice.

"—we could call her Blue!" Andy finishes triumphantly.

"That's a great idea." April tries to maneuver him away from the raptor pen, but Andy's enamored of the tiny dinosaurs and spends every possible moment around them.

"Do they all have names?" Ben asks.

Andy points and recites. "Blue, Charlie, Delta, Echo."

Ben clearly runs through at least half of the NATO alphabet in his head before working out what's missing. "No Alpha?"

"I'm their alpha," Andy says.

"Sweetie, no, you are _not_ , you're only allowed in here because I'm in here," April reminds him.

Andy holds one hand over the pen, fingers spread wide. "Who's your alpha?" he says to the dinosaurs, each of whom stand about a foot tall at present and are still, as far as April knows, mentally barely out of infancy. "Who's your alp—ow, Charlie, don't _nip_."

"Don't tease her; she knows it's feeding time." April picks up the plate of dead but mostly whole chicken and moves to drop it in the pen, but Andy insists on taking over.

"Here you go, babies," Andy croons. "Here you go."

Leslie blinks and then turns away as the raptors pounce on the chicken. April watches. She always watches. These animals are her responsibility, and if she loses touch with how they operate, how they function, how they _feed_...

If Leslie's this squeamish now, what is she going to be like when they move on to bigger things?

*

April hasn't crossed paths with all of the others at once more than a handful of times in the last nine months, but tonight she sits down to eat with them in the dining room instead of just throwing something together in the cafeteria.

Ann and Leslie hug for a long, long time. Ron and Leslie hug for a shorter time, but the way Ron looks at Leslie, with a good deal of pride in his eyes, speaks volumes. Donna gives Leslie an amiable squeeze and pinches Ben's backside. Chris and Ben do that rough-hug-backslapping-thing. Andy's already hugged both Ben and Leslie but does so again for good measure.

"How's Washington?" Ron asks.

Leslie and Ben exchange a glance and an eye roll.

"There's nothing we can tell you that the television can't, Ron. Or the internet. But you—you have to tell us all about what's happening here!" Leslie punctuates the sentence by stabbing her fork into the prawn and papaya salad in front of her and shoveling greenery into her mouth.

"Dinosaurs, existing, now," Ben says. "Explain that part to me."

"I think there's someone better qualified to explain that than us," April starts, all ready to introduce Dr Wu, who's just slipped in and sat down a couple of seats away.

"Mosquitos!" Andy says.

Leslie looks blank, but Ben's eyes light up. "You're extracting the DNA from the blood?"

"If I may," Dr Wu interposes himself verbally between Andy and Ben, and April watches as he makes Ben's eyes go wide with amazement. Ben does try to keep eating, but misses his mouth with the fork more often than he hits, utterly wrapped up in what Dr Wu is saying.

Leslie remains Leslie even in the face of the reversal of extinction, gobbling down her entrée with gusto and then digging into the chicken tamales that are the main course with only the slightest of frowns crossing her face when the chef announces that it's chicken. April has watched the raptors far too many times to get squeamish about coincidences in dining fare. To be totally fair to the raptors, right now Ben is being more of a messy eater than they are.

"So how do you not just get a bunch of mosquitos? Ben, you have gallo pinto on your chin." Leslie spits on her napkin and whips it across Ben's face.

"It's a delicate process, Ms Knope." Which is as informal as Dr Wu ever gets, even with April coaching him repeatedly on the lack of need for formal titles. "If you'd like, after dinner we could go into the primary sequencing lab and I could show you some more of how it works."

"Yes please," Ben says before anyone else can say anything.

That's okay; what April has to show them is better seen in daylight anyway.

*

Andy wants to follow Leslie and Ben to the lab after dinner, but April talks him into coming outside and joining her to check on the T-rex. The rex, like the raptors, is still only a juvenile. Unlike the raptors, she needs a lot of space.

The rex's pen is set well away from the brachi pen. About the same size, it may not serve to hold the rex to maturity; not because she'll get so big that she'll be able to climb out, but just because she's already spending a lot of time pacing the perimeter, like it's too small for her.

April remembers watching tigers pace in zoos when she was younger. Their sinewy elegance combined with their pretty, fuzzy faces always made her feel sorry for them. Never mind that they're predators and not just overgrown housecats. Although she's seen what housecats can do to mice. She felt sorry for the tigers because they looked miserable.

Watching the rex pace just makes her want to not piss the dinosaur off. Watching the rex pace—she can't be mistaken for anything but a predator. Not a bored chicken or a depressed lizard. Her yellow eyes glimmer with intelligence. Her claws dig gouges into the soil. If she ever got the notion into her head to dig her way out—April shakes her head to dismiss the thought. The rex doesn't look miserable, she looks furious.

"Are you sure that we can't feed her tonight?" Jorge, one of her co-veterinary assistants, asks.

"We need her on display tomorrow."

Andy switches on the intercom between the viewing room—considerably more armored than that overlooking the brachi pen—and the rex's pen. He starts making soothing noises into it. The rex cocks her head, listening, and stops pacing.

"It's not like she's got anywhere else to go," Jorge says.

"Jorge, if you want to tell Mr Masrani how to show the animals off…"

Jorge is one of the staff on the island who's more concerned about his paycheck—and thus doing exactly what the big boss wants—than about the animals, and therefore he shuts up. April nods, and he walks away, bound for the staff quarters section of the main compound.

April looks into the pen, where the rex is still standing motionless, listening to Andy's crooning. As nice as getting sung to by Andy is, it's not a substitute for a real meal. Masrani's ordered them all to keep food from the rex whenever they have an important visitor coming, so that she'll make a better display for the guests. So far the guests have mostly been investors rather than politicians, but April knows Masrani's going to be wooing plenty more of those in the future as well. An endeavor like this doesn't just up and run itself without political backing as well as financial backing.

Watching the rex stand there, stilled for a short time by one of the voices that she knows the best, April wonders if Masrani ever remembers whose backing he needs the most: that of the prehistoric animals his company has chosen against all odds and all reason to create.

*

"What exactly does Andy do here?" Leslie asks over breakfast, making appreciative sounds over the strawberries, fresh even though it's the wrong season. (As if out of season GMO strawberries are a hard thing to raise in the greenhouses out back, compared to _dinosaurs_.)

"I'm going to be the tour director," Andy says, and Ben snickers before realizing he's serious.

"Andy's got an excellent flair for showmanship," Ron says, putting bacon on his bacon. "He's also spent time in a recording studio before, so Masrani decided that if he was going to come here with April he could record voiceovers for the exhibits."

"Oh, like self-guided museum tours?" Leslie asks, grinning when April nods.

"Except that here, the dinosaurs aren't just bones!" Andy waves his fork, flicking egg everywhere.

"We'll obviously have more than one tour guide when everything's up and running," Ann says, calmly wiping egg off her cheek.

"Andy's been literally all over the island," Chris puts in. "Well, almost. There's a lot of rainforest out there. But the parts that are going to be cleared for the park, at least."

April can _see_ Leslie leap into protector of the environment mode. "How much exactly were you planning to clear?" She looks ready to chain herself to a brontosaurus leg, just in case they propose to log the entire island.

"As little as possible," Chris says soothingly. "The idea is that we'll have ways to move among the dinosaurs without disrupting either them or the areas they're living in."

"But they'll all be fenced in? They're not just roaming?" Ben asks.

"Some species will mingle, but obviously the carnivores, like the raptors, will be kept separately in their own exhibits," Andy says in his tour-guide voice.

"Because having carnivores actively hunting herbivores is a bizarre perversion of the natural order," Ron says through his bacon.

April's heard this before. "Yes, but Ron, you don't let the lions at the zoo out to play with the antelope."

"Only because people have trouble with observing the real world," Ron mutters.

*

After breakfast Andy takes over, organizing everyone into one of two ATVs. He drives one, April the other. Most of the roads on the island are still just lines on a map at this stage, just like everything else, but the tracks through the jungle are becoming more and more defined every day. And the construction work spreads out either side of the beaten trail: dozens of heavy-duty machines brought to the island in pieces and reassembled before work could begin.

It's begun now, though. Digging sewer lines and ditches and excavating holes for security and storage bunkers. April watches Leslie watching the machines chew away at the jungle. Leslie's forehead is furrowed, even though she has to know that sometimes to create a park—and this is just another big park, after all—things have to be torn down before they can be built up.

"We're only going to be using something like fifteen percent of the island," April says. "The rest is going to be mostly untouched, except where we're going to fence areas off to contain the herbivores. They'll have plenty of room to wander and graze, but visitors need to be sure they're going to see something."

"How many different species do you have?" Ben asks.

"At the moment the lab's working on thirteen." April follows Andy as the lead ATV takes the left-hand path, the one that leads deeper into the mountains. Eventually it's going to go up to the gyrosphere launching station, once that's not just a square jotted on a map. There are some spectacular views from up there, though, and she approves of her husband's choice of tour destinations. While the sulfur fields look amazing, she doesn't want to stink of rotten eggs all day.

"How many of those are herbivores?"

"Ten," Ron says.

"So you have velociraptors. What other carnivores do you have?"

"Sweetie, they'll tell us when we get to them," Leslie tells Ben, which relieves April a little.

The radio crackles. It's Donna, back at the head office. Donna does not do jungles. "April, Masrani wants to know when you'll be back from the field."

"What's he even doing here?"

"Making sure that your visitors are happy," Donna says, which means 'making sure you're not doing anything that will politically jeopardize the park'.

"We're going up to the main lookout. Does he want us to come straight back?"

"I think he'd like to feed the big girl while he's here, and he's leaving after lunch."

April looks at the ATV ahead of her, with the coolers full of food that she had the kitchen make up for them. "I thought we'd eat out here..."

"Whatever you want, doll, but he'd really like to see you."

April sighs and switches the radio over. "Andy, babe, we're going to have to keep this quick..."

*

Even though their time is to be cut short, the view from the lookout is nothing short of stunning. April, having seen it before, watches Leslie and Ben as they look around. From the lookout the mountain slopes down into a lush plain surrounded by jungle, a dozen shades of green vying for attention. Looking upward, the mountain disappears into what April has never been quite sure is mist or very low-lying clouds. Distant steam billows up from the sulfur fields, from what would be truly amazing hot springs if they weren't so virulently yellow and literally boiling. Everything is bordered in blue: the sky above, the sea below. The hues are rich and unreal, like a child's coloring book adorned vigorously with Crayolas.

It's a good thing the view is so lovely, because when April finally herds everyone back to the ATVs and tries to start hers up, it hacks politely and then goes quiet.

Ron tinkers with the engine. Andy suggests taking the working ATV back to base so that Leslie and Ben can at least meet Masrani. April discreetly steps on his foot and offers up the notion that maybe it would be nicer to just have lunch out here like they planned, let Ron get the ATV working, and Masrani can just call Leslie sometime and tap into whatever political hierarchy he thinks she's a part of that way.

"Do you think he overestimated how much leverage Leslie has with the government?" Ann asks, catching the tail end of the conversation.

"I don't think anyone can ever overestimate Leslie," April says.

*

They're still up there an hour later.

"Are you gonna make it back?" Donna crackles over the radio. The radios would work a lot better if they had proper satellite towers, but proper satellite towers are another six months away, according to the blueprints.

April looks at Leslie spreading out the picnic rug on the rough wooden boards of the lookout. "Sorry."

"I could send one of the guys out to collect you," Donna says half-heartedly. She knows April doesn't want to play politics.

"Just tell Masrani I'll call him when I get back."

"Fine. But he's got his own visitors and they're going to feed the rex, just FYI."

April wishes she could put her hand through the radio and cover Donna's mouth, but Ben's mouth is already dropping open.

"Gotta go," she says hastily.

" _You have a Tyrannosaurus Rex?!_ " Ben looks exactly like a twelve-year-old boy.

"Just a baby one, really," Andy says, also looking exactly like a twelve-year-old boy despite attempting to be blasé. "She's only a foot taller than me."

"Those are the really big ones, right?" Leslie asks through a mouthful of sandwich.

"Eventually. Our rex is only a juvenile, though..." April lets herself go into her talking-to-investors patter, which covers the basics from anticipated animal size to housing to feeding.

She skips the part about how the rex makes a convenient waste disposal unit for the animals that don't make it to maturity, though. Like Ron says, people have trouble with observing the real world.

"What if it escapes?" Ben asks just as April thinks she's gotten away with discussing a several-ton carnivorous dinosaur without getting to the potential havoc part.

"She won't escape. We have too many safeguards," Andy says. "Besides, she likes me singing to her."

" _Singing_?"

Andy starts in on explaining his 'training' routine—meaning how he plays with the dinosaurs to distract them while April and her team do things like blood tests and temperature checks.

Ben's not wrong to be worried. April's seen the look in her rex's eyes. She knows that she would escape if she could. And she doesn't know what the rex would do if she _did_ escape. But she shouldn't be able to escape. Safeguards, Andy's said, but there's more than that to it; Masrani keeps adding new kinds of fencing to the plans, thicker concrete, more electricity, and it always comes after one of those three scientists—Malcolm, Sattler, and Grant—contacts him.

April wishes she knew what they say to Masrani to make him keep tightening up security, but if there's one thing Masrani keeps absolutely secure, it's those communications.

*

Picnic over, they're heading back down the trail with Ron driving April's ATV in case of any further engine trouble, given that he's the car whisperer.

The ATV comes to a jerking halt and April's about to reach for the radio, to tell Donna yes, okay, can she send one of the guys out in a jeep or something, when she realizes that they've stopped because Andy's stopped.

Two massive tree trunks block the track ahead. Except they're still upright, not the usual fallen trunks. And they're mottled green and brown like pebbles, not the deeper richer brown of the trees around here. And instead of roots they have claws. Big claws.

And instead of branches—

Something spatters on the flimsy canopy over April's head. It's not rain, or jungle dew. It's viscous and dark and she can see shreds of the animal that it came from in the mouth of the creature standing in the road.

"Damn," Ron says, shifts into reverse, and jams the accelerator to the floor.

Leslie screams. Ben screams. April doesn't scream but only because she's forgotten how to breathe. She's trying to see around Ron to see if the other ATV is following them, and Ron's trying to see around her so he doesn't back them into a tree, and a long, loud roar chases them along the trail.

"Hold on!" Ron yells, changing gear and whipping them off the road into the jungle.

If April didn't know better, she'd almost think he was enjoying this.

Somewhere behind them, the dinosaur (adult T-rex, fully fucking grown adult T-rex, how and why and _how_?) roars again. April leans forward, grabbing the radio mic from between Ron and Ben, and broadcasts the emergency signal she's memorized but never thought she'd have to use.

_Animal loose_.

Such a tiny phrase for their current situation, racing through thick jungle, through whatever gaps between the trees that Ron can find, with those roars behind them, and Andy—

She doesn't know what to think about Andy. Other than that while she can hear roaring, she can't hear screaming. Not pained screaming, anyway; Leslie's still making terrified noises.

April is suddenly very, very aware that the vehicle in which she is sitting is little more than a more agile golf cart. They're made for easy travel and taking people on quick tours. She thinks there might be a first aid kit underneath the seat, but there's nothing in the way of tranquilizers or, preferably, a really big bazooka of some description.

Leslie's hand locks onto hers as they judder and jounce through the trees, and April clings to her in return.

*

Donna doesn't believe her at first when April tries to explain that the _animal loose_ is not one of their animals and is in fact a fully grown T-rex, but the animal's roars in the background lend credence to her claim.

They don't have a formal plan in place for an escaped animal of this size. Mainly because they don't _have_ animals of this size. Oh, well, some of the brachis are close, but they don't come equipped with fangs.

When they burst out of the jungle onto the wide plain that's slated to be _Gallimimus Grass_ on the maps, it's entirely bare of rescue vehicles, people with weapons, and in fact anything else except for one of the fresh-turned earth mounds intended to house a storage room.

April sees the other ATV to their right, which is reassuring. Andy, Ann, and Chris are all still on board, which is even better. What's less reassuring is that the rex is still somewhere behind them and, judging from the ongoing roars, not too far behind at that.

"Just keep going," Chris says over the radio. "If we make it across the grass there's another access road and we've _got_ to be faster than it on a road." So he says, as if he's an expert on rex behavior. Even April isn't an expert. She's seen their comparatively little rex run around her enclosure, but it's not like she can extrapolate just how big of a turn of speed a fully grown adult rex can manage compared to a juvenile in a confined space.

But yeah, they might just make it across the grass, who knows? It's not like it's a suburban lawn completely bare of any obstacles except for garden gnomes, but it's got a hundred percent fewer branches whipping around at face height, which April very much appreciates.

Then Andy's ATV hits something. A log, a rock, something half-buried in the gently waving grass, and April sees the vehicle roll, and this time she finds the breath to scream.

"Go back! Go back!" Ben yells.

"Son, I _can't_ ," Ron says grimly.

"But—"

That's when the rex breaks free of the treeline, and Ron's right: they can't go back.

Not even when the gas tank of the other ATV explodes.

*

It's almost full dark, the moon a crescent sliver in the star-dotted sky. The fire has spread from the ATV into the grass, but it's so thick with moisture that the fire hasn't really gotten a proper foothold. The rex has retreated into the trees, dissuaded by the smell of smoke.

April can't see anyone else moving around out there.

"We can't just shoot blind," the head of the security squad says for what must be the fifth time. "We'd risk enraging it, not to mention hitting things we don't want to hit."

The category of _things we don't want to hit_ includes but is not limited to:

  *          the head nurse for the human inhabitants of the island
  *          the investments manager for the whole operation
  *          and April's husband—who isn't a vet or a nurse or even a real tour guide, not really, but who nonetheless is a vital part of the island's day to day operations, simply because April can't imagine doing _anything_ without his input.



The hummock that conceals what's intended to be a storage bunker someday blocks the security team's line of sight to the jungle anyway, as does the smoldering remains of the ATV. It's a flickery orange glow, something that in a different context would be comforting. Maybe there would be marshmallows.

There aren't marshmallows. Instead, there's the keening roar of the rex again, and April can't figure out why it's come out of the jungle until a part of the orange flames detaches itself, and moves away from the rest, and resolves into a flare in Andy's hand.

It's crazy. It's something they've been using to train their little rex when there's food, waving a signal flare, and even _she_ doesn't always respond, let alone this—

The rex ducks its head, and Andy hurls the flare, and the explosion is so bright that April's blinded.

*

Turns out the flares in the tiny storage space weren't the friendly little road flares they usually use.

Turns out they were the kind of flare intended to light up the sky, not just warn people about black ice or somesuch.

Turns out they also do a decent job of shredding a dinosaur's head right down to the bone, until it looks like a particularly gory museum exhibit.

Ann is half-carrying Chris, who's got bandages around his left leg. Both of them are bruised and scraped. April registers and dismisses this in the same second, fixated on Andy, who's just frozen in place watching the rex fall.

He doesn't move, and so she goes to him, running through the knee-high grass.

She doesn't want to think about what he's covered in when she throws her arms around him.

*

Masrani lets them go without a whimper, paying them through the end of the financial year, a monetary prop to hold up their non-disclosure agreements. Said agreements are tightened up even further with another round of contracts to sign before they can leave the island.

Maybe there's a little whimper in there, after all. A little warning whimper.

The chopper is waiting and Andy's not there.

April finds him leaning over the raptor pen. Even after seeing what happened to their much bigger distant cousin, he hasn't lost his affection for the babies.

"Will we come back and see them when they're grown up?" he asks.

"Are you crazy?" April shakes her head. "I know this sounds totally weird, but let's just go home and watch TV and maybe never leave the house again, okay?"

"We don't have a home to go to," Andy reminds her.

"Ben and Leslie's, jeez. At least for now."

"Oh." Andy reaches down and scratches Blue absently under the jaw; the little raptor's eyes close and she looks more like a cat than either a bird or a lizard as she leans into his touch. "You still don't think we should stay?"

April takes a deep breath. There's the rex—the older one, being autopsied by her team to find out the _how_ and the _why_ , and the younger one, her rex, that they can maybe teach not to go after humans. There's Ian Malcolm and Alan Grant and Ellie Sattler, out there somewhere, and NDA or no NDA she thinks she can find out whether this has happened before.

And if it's happened before, whether it might happen again. Whether all their checks and balances would ever be enough.

Blue grabs Andy's finger between her teeth and kicks at his hand with tiny claws, scratching his palm open. Andy pulls his hand away, scolding her, but it's enough for April.

"Come on." She hustles him out of the lab, out of the building, onto the chopper.

As Isla Nublar becomes a tiny green speck in the vast blue ocean below them, April closes her eyes and begins mentally composing a letter to Ian Malcolm.

She's going to have to mentally edit out all the _what the fuck_ s before she ever actually sends it, but it's a start.

*

The third night they're at Ben and Leslie's April wakes up screaming at five in the morning and it takes all three of them—Ben and Leslie and Andy—to convince her that the growl outside is just the garbage truck.

*

All she ever gets back from Ian Malcolm is _I told them so_.


End file.
